Arctic blast tested consumer patience, utility resilience

Did you have problems with electricity, gas or your car this week? How long did it take for help to arrive? Tell us in the comments section below.

View full sizeA snow covered globe outside the Cleveland Museum of Natural History on Tuesday inadvertently reflected the national weather situation.Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND- Whether it was scattered power failures, unexpected drops in gas line pressures or dead car batteries, technology and consumer patience were tested this week.

The coldest weather in two decades forced the utilities to field emergency crews to restore power and gas across the region as spotty failures continued to pop up Tuesday.

And while a dead furnace is a potential catastrophe, a dead battery is still a calamity for someone. The AAA handled 1,946 calls in Northeast Ohio for roadside assistance by Tuesday evening, most for dead batteries.

FirstEnergy Corp. scrambled emergency workers all day Tuesday to restore power to some 20,000 homes scattered throughout its service area as the heavy winds knocked trees and lines down, including a high voltage line serving several neighborhoods.

Columbia Gas of Ohio had crews working into Tuesday night in Lorain County, going house-to-house to get furnaces and appliances reconnected after line pressures had unexpectedly plummeted, forcing the heating equipment to shut down in more than 2,200 homes in North Ridgeville, Elyria and Eaton Township area in Lorain County.

The company Tuesday night urged residents whose appliances had not been turned back on to keep porch lights on to signal emergency crews.

And Dominion East Ohio, which had appealed Monday for conservation, had crews dealing with less than 1,000 low-pressure or no-gas complaints on Tuesday.

More than half of the complaints were due to furnaces that needed repairs or because furnaces had shut down when the power failed, said the company. Heating equipment manufactured before 2003 will not re-set itself and must be manually re-started.

Some of the low pressure problems resulted when big lines feeding Dominion's system had problems, said Jeff Murphy, managing director, commercial operations.

"We get fed by a lot of interstate pipelines. Some may have been having problems," Murphy said.

In any gas distribution system, pressures may vary slightly, said Murphy, as demand surges and declines. Operators try to maintain volumes and pressures throughout the system - a balancing act that gets more difficult as volumes increase.

Dominion had estimated that customers would demand as much as 2.3 billion cubic feet of gas from Monday morning through Tuesday morning. On a typical January day, the demand is about 1.7 to 1.8 billion cubic feet, said Murphy.

Demand came in slightly below, after the company's appeal for conservation, he said, and maybe because temperatures did not fall as low as the company believed they would.

As temperatures fell to about 0 degrees Tuesday evening, the company was estimating demand would total about 2 billion cubic feet by Wednesday morning.

Dominion's distribution system was designed to handle more than 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas and temperatures averaging minus 13 degrees over a 24-hour period, Murphy said.

The last time that happened was in January 1994 when the average low temperatures were warmer.

More efficient heating equipment and industrial efficiencies and closures have cut peak demand, he said.

The gas line problems puzzled many customers, some of whom wondered whether gas was in short supply or the system broken down.

A sudden drop in pressure and the volume in a large gas line from outside the Columbia Gas of Ohio system created the problems for Columbia customers, said spokesman Ray Frank.

"The transmission line that serves a particular Columbia (pressure) regulator station serving these neighborhoods had operational problems, and the pressure and volume of the incoming gas dropped down, and our customers lost service," he said.

Columbia crews quickly figured out the problem, based on the complaints from consumers. Then came the hard part, re-pressuring the local line and going house to house to make sure appliances were back in service.

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